Hometown: Shorashim, Israel
Current city: New York, NY
Age: 37
College and degree: NYU Tisch School of the Arts (BFA)
Website: www.nettay.com
How you pay the bills: Commissions from dance companies/festivals/university departments, fellowships/awards, dancing for another artist, teaching dance in the city, and a few private yoga clients.
All of the dance hats you wear: Choreographer, dancer, teacher, student, administrator, bookkeeper, PR person, fundraiser, manager, consultant.
Non-dance work you do: Teach private yoga
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Describe your dance life ….
The first five years after college: I was making dances when I was at Tisch and never stopped. Right out of school I was always making work and always looking for every opportunity to show it. I presented my work at many funky shows all over town. I often had to pay a small fee to be part of these group shows, but I always did it, even though I was losing money. It was never a question somehow. I took class as much as I could afford to, I worked at many jobs that had nothing to do with dance and didn’t love that reality but knew it was inevitable. I kept in touch with dancers and choreographers that I was interested in working with and tried to make new connections and make myself available to opportunities, even ones I was critical about. In the early years I tried to come to terms with the notion of not “succeeding” as a dancer. I could see how impossibly difficult it would be to find work as a dancer. I focused most of my sense of self on the part of me that identified as “choreographer” – the part of me that I had more control over, and something I was 100% invested in anyway.
But I started getting opportunities to dance with people I really admired and I started getting paid to dance and that was intoxicating. Also, my notion of what it meant to succeed as a dancer became more complex and more realistic.
Ten years after college: By then I was dancing with Doug Varone and Dancers as well as a few other choreographers and my work was beginning to be presented by reputable venues. But essentially my appetite for work- creating, dancing, exchanging ideas about dance – this remained incessant as it was in the early years. I continued to say "yes" to almost any opportunity that arose. I was juggling way too much.
A typical day during those years included teaching private yoga clients at 8am, then going to rehearsal with Doug for 6 hours and then continuing to a rehearsal for my own work. And I toured a lot.
Now: I work as a freelancer in every respect. I spend my time almost exclusively creating work, and I dance for just a few independent choreographers whose work really really interests me. My life now is as busy as ever but I have more control and can really pick and choose how I spend it. I have an overwhelming amount of administrative and production work to do in support of my choreography.
Mentors/someone who believed in you:
Nancy Bannon, Doug Varone, and Gus Solomons were all people that I met early on at Tisch. In very different ways, and in different junctures in my career, they each helped me to trust my creative intuitions and to feel that there was value, depth, and power in what I was putting out into the world.
Trisha Brown, Robert Wilson, Paul Klee, Yoel Hoffman, Doug Varone, Franz Klein, Julia Wolf, Virginia Wolf, Tere O’Connor, William Forsythe
What is on your calendar for 2015?
In mid March my work HELGA AND THE THREE SAILORS (November 2014 premiere @Danspace Project) was remounted by the Joyce Theater at New York Live Arts. Most recently, I completed a commission for the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company in Salt Lake City, and I am about to finish a new work at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia (my sixth work there since 2011). In May I will be in Tel Aviv setting a section from my work PICTOGRAMS (commissioned by ADF) on dancers at Ha Maslool Conservatory. In the fall I’ll be setting all of PICTOGRAMS at Tisch/NYU. I am performing in a new work by Joanna Kotze that has a premiere near DC in April and a New York premiere in September. I will spend October and November as an Artist In Residence at Djerassi (California) where I will be beginning to develop my next project.
How do you find balance having your own company, dancing for others, making work, arts administration, teaching? How do each of these tasks relate and support the other tasks?
It is very hard. I often don’t feel balanced. But I feel grateful that my life is art, that my art is so dimensional – physical, intellectual, poetic, etc. The constant shifts in modes and the many tasks that never end - this is incredibly exhausting. Some things - like administrative work and logistics and politic-ing - those are never generative and never seem to support anything but their immediate end goals. In contrast – being in the studio for hours creating and researching my work, interacting with the dancers and other collaborators, going to hear lectures, meeting with friends, going to museums, going to see shows, talking about the shows, hiking in nature, cooking, working with/teaching students, reading, going home to be with family in Israel, traveling in general – these things are in dialogue with one another and are thus mutually informative and generative forces in my life.
How do you find dancers? What do you look for in a dancer?
It is different for every project. I have never worked with someone who I don’t know at all. My next project has a clear structure and conceptual frame and I will just need to fill in the cast with dancers – most probably ones I’ve worked with before and others that I have had my eye on for a while from my seat in the audience... But most often I will begin knowing who I want to work with before I know what I will make. For my last project I knew I wanted to work with some students of mine from Philadelphia. That was the initial spark. Casts for other works have come together in a variety of ways but I’m always looking for people that are incredibly talented movers, usually highly skilled but able to dismantle their training and meander into lesser known modalities, really smart and rigorous thinkers, able to access their wit and strangeness, and dancers who connect deeply to what I make. There is nothing worse than encountering an eager dancer who I feel is connecting with me because they think I might be able to give them a gig but who ultimately has no real sense of what I make and has never shown up at my performances.
Three pieces of advice for aspiring choreographers:
Make work and show it a lot. You will learn from all of it.
Stay focused on the work you want to make and not on the competition, the trends, what’s cool. This might seem trivial but it isn’t.
Be informed about the dance, theater, performance discourses, and art in general that are being created around you. Know that what you are making will not be received in a vacuum.
What is it like to be commissioned to make work on dancers (companies) that you do not know personally and are just getting to know? How do you approach this work?
At this point I am extremely comfortable doing this even though these commissions often come with tight timelines. The pressure to make a (good) dance very quickly is something I wrestle with. I try to approach these situations with a general sense of the context: what is important to this company, who is their audience, what kind of other work do they do, what kind of dance community do they work in, etc. With a short (two-three week) process, I know that what we can achieve will be limited in terms of investigation but I do try to find ways to both challenge myself and the dancers to go outside of our own comfortable and known territories. I am not interested in re-creating the same dance again and again. I don’t even tend to reset existing work (setting PICTOGRAMS next year will be my first). I work fast, I try not to hesitate too much, put ideas together and look at them even if they are bad, develop loads of movement material with the dancers, try different musical scores (if I use a musical score as a guide it is always a conscious choice aimed at expediting the process - music fills in SO many gaps…). The difficult thing is that I often don’t get to guide the work into the theater, be there for lighting decisions, and most important I don’t get to be there to see the dance in performance and feel the responses from the audience. It is a rather strange turn around – very intensely caring about something for 12 hours a day for three weeks nonstop - and then having to let it go completely.
You have worked at the American Dance Festival. What was this experience like? Advice to young dancers on attending one of the iconic dance festivals here in the US - ADF, Bates, or Jacob’s Pillow….
ADF was a dream. I hand-picked 19 dancers out of 300. They were such a diverse and incredible group. The energy in the rehearsals was so focused and generous - perhaps it was the fact that we were working in 90 degrees and 100% humidity ☺. The support from the festival, on the production side, was wonderful. I was very happy with the stage and costume designs and the piece was very warmly received. It was overwhelming how much people loved this piece – over-excited young students and sophisticated New Yorkers alike…
My advise for young dancers at these festivals is to be open to new things. Listen to your gut, but also be sure that your gut isn’t just guiding you to choose the classes that most resemble the classes you have back home or the ones you feel you already master. Be active not just in the classroom - take part in discussions, showings, panels, etc. Go see everything (shows) and talk about these shows with your friends and teachers. Devour.
These days, how do you train and care for your body?
I take ballet. I practice Iyengar yoga, I warm up very well for rehearsal, I rest, I go to the gym - it depends what I need. I’m constantly negotiating and balancing my body’s needs.
Wishes for the future:
Hmmmm...I’d love for my works to tour nationally and internationally, to gain more recognition and through that - support. I’d love to have work in Europe and in Israel- it is fertilizing for me to create in different eco systems.
I want to keep dancing for other choreographers - I hope that continues forever.
but
My biggest wish is for my work to get better and deeper and more honest and more distilled. Ultimately - my life’s work is not to achieve this or that honor or award – but to make really powerful, thought provoking work that leaves imprints in others and engenders discourse and opens avenues of thought and perception.
Final advice to young dancers:
Love yourself. Work hard to expand every aspect of your artistry, but know that being you is the most important part. No one else can be you and you can’t be others.
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